Mormon fuzzy: the circuit-boy-meets-Mormon romance Latter Days is sweet, sexy, and affecting.

Latter Days * Written and directed by C. Jay Cox * Starring Wes Ramsey, Steve Sandvoss, Jacqueline Bisset * TLA Films

Of the current, glut of movies about gay Mormons--OK, there are two, but it seems like a glut--only one will make you shout, "Give me that bandanna in your back pocket, Mary, this one is going to be a gusher!" (I'm talking about weeping here.) That film is the satisfyingly heartbreaking indie drama Latter Days, a multiple award-winner on the gay and lesbian film festival circuit that marks the directorial debut of out screenwriter C. Jay Cox (Sweet Home Alabama). At only a third the length of that other gay Mormon movie, Mike Nichols's epic Angels in America, it's wonderful in a much more concentrated, more conventional form. It's sweet; it's sad; there's lots of nudity--you'll love it.

The heartfelt story of a West Hollywood hottie named Christian (Wes Ramsey) who falls for 19-year-old Mormon elder Aaron Davis (Steve Sandvoss), the sexually confused missionary next door, Latter Days makes the case that Mr. Right beats Mr. Right Now, even if he has to be excommunicated before he can register at Crate & Barrel. True happiness, the film suggests, lies not in all endless stream of meaningless sex--as fun as that can be--but in the all-consuming, completely inconvenient love that shakes you up from molding mud to Pumas. In Cox's script, which dallies with cliche but thankfully never marries it, both young men realize they need to chuck everything they've ever known to have everything they've ever wanted.

Despite some awkward stabs at laundry room profundity--did that Mormon really tell that queen "We're colors and whites, we don't mix"?--and some instantly dated references--no, no, not a Miss Cleo joke!--the film works because Ramsey (recently seen by very few people on the now-canceled Fox sitcom Luis) and Sandvoss (a Harvard-educated newcomer) are so appealing together. The particularly winning Sandvoss brings blond good looks--imagine a Viking pool boy--and touching vulnerability to his role as the openly Mormon, secretly gay teen missionary. He's proof positive that repressed chicken is an irresistible dish.

More famous performers lend the two relatively unknown actors splendid support. Jacqueline Bisset is as ravishing as ever as the owner of the posh restaurant where Christian waits tables. Mary Kay Place is appropriately brittle as Aaron's devout and devastated mother, while Joseph Gordon-Levitt (3rd Rock From the Sun) is all well-scrubbed smarm as the closed-minded straight roommate who catches the boys in a lip-lock and rats them out.

Although the film predictably indicts the Mormon belief that homosexuality is an abomination, Latter Days is fair-minded enough to show that all but the biggest homophobes have reachable hearts. It also suggests that Mormonism and homosexuality are equally alternative as lifestyles go these days. One just happens to be a hell of a lot more fan than the other.

Writer-performer DeCaro was the movie critic on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart for 6 1/2 years.